Homesteading stories - Take Two & Three
From Hungary to Scotland & England. And how we got to Romania with a swing of a pendulum.
Take 2: Let’s pick up the story where they left off, just as Cheryl, Csermely and Roland were leaving their sunny homestead in Hungary…
… finally to end up in a two-room wooden home (as seen above on April 8th, 2025) in Breb, Romania, where it’s a bit colder and a lot less sunny, but with a lot more water - in the creek and in the form of rainfall.
Before they arrived here, they were somewhere else, but they weren’t homesteading during that time.
Instead, they headed to Scotland, just like in a traditional Hungarian folk tale, to try their luck elsewhere. After spending a month in Paris waiting for a visa, they arrived to Edinburgh with enough money to stay for one night during the busiest time of the year - Festival Fringe.
As the story goes, it was raining that auspicious day. Raining really, really hard, a typical Edinburgh welcoming downpour. And so, with everything they owned on their backs and a four-year-old daughter in tow, they trusted the Universe, the only card they had left. It led to one farmers market with no such luck, then another, quite a walk away. They had to approach only three unsuspecting sellers before an offer came up:
A place to work and stay in exchange for food and accommodation.
A simple requirement for a small family in need, but certainly not a small ask from people who know absolutely nothing about them.
As luck would have it, the arrangement with a certain organic farm became a favorable one. He worked on a reforestation project, planting nearly 14,000 trees in the not-quite-an-entire-year they stayed in a “camping house”, while she cooked wholesome lunches for the family. Eventually, the time to take a leap of faith once again presented itself, as it often does, when you are escaping something… even if one isn’t quite clear what that is at the time.
This time, the leap took them down to Totnes, England, but that chapter of the book has been erased for reasons untold.
Take 3: What they were ultimately seeking wasn’t to be found in the “west” after all. It was to be discovered in Romania, via a series of unfortunate events that led to picking up a pendulum and calling in some guides for “Help!”.
When she picked up that pendulum, and stated her request - we wish to live in a place where we can be happy and healthy - it started to swing in a particular direction. Placed on a map, the straight line extended from Southeastern Hungary all the way into Ukraine.
For practical reasons of not wanting to learn yet another language (and you see what’s going on now…), and intuition telling them it was just before that border, on the now Romanian side where they might just try their luck, they searched the map and just a hair off the line was a small village (with a population of about 1,000 inhabitants) called Breb, a place they had never even heard of.
Time was running away, being both jobless and homeless for a few weeks, taking advantage of a good friend’s generosity and not feeling all that good about it, knowing that change was inevitable and now was the time to take action.
On a whim, and with a little research under their belts, they packed their backpacks one last time, again with just enough money to spend one night in the sleepy little village mentioned above. They were offered a ride with a friend of a friend all the way to the Nagykároly/Carei train station, not quite to the final destination, but close enough to know that this final move felt right.
The following day, they took an early bus to Breb from Nagybánya/Baia Mare. When they arrived, not much to their surprise, or yours, it was raining.
The sky was dropping just enough tears to be chilly on an early October day. After they settled into their accommodation, they introduced themselves to their hosts - offering up the reason they came, skipping the bit about the sway of the pendulum.
Being a traditional village, there was nothing “for rent”, at least back then.
So, the man talked and talked, meeting curious people who couldn’t believe their eyes or ears, until someone finally said yes, with just a tiny horincă-filled hint of trepidation in his voice. He had a small house his family wasn’t using and the small family could stay there in exchange for the man helping with some work - such as cutting firewood, hauling manure to the fields, and making haystacks, among other village chores.
And they stayed, and they worked, and they became writers and lovers of the land in which they dowsed to become part of.
Eight years later, they still live in Breb, in a different wooden house, with a peaceful creek that runs through the meadows among the trees.
It’s their simple life that keeps them going - chopping wood, bringing in water, gardening, foraging, teaching workshops, and preserving wildness that keeps them in tune with the nature of living on this beautiful Earth.
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What a fantastic story! Maybe there was bravery involved, but what I notice is trust or faith, a determination to find and follow a light that no one else thought existed. That's really inspiring.
I'm in awe of the adventure you all went on as a family. I love that you just picked a random spot "let's go here in Romania" and I love it even more that it all worked out for you :-)